Urban sustainability and resilience demand a reexamination of urban and regional development with the goal of making cities a positive force for environmental stewardship. The challenge is to make cities centers of regional leadership, resource efficiency, engaged citizenship, and humane living rather than the source of continued resource depletion and environmental degradation. As every business, governmental agency, and non-profit organization is facing increasingly complex decisions related to environmental change, the field of urban sustainability demands of its professionals a broad, multi-faceted, interdisciplinary education, including work in the humanities that speaks to the ultimate purposes of city life. Xavier University’s M.A. in urban sustainability provides the breadth of complementary approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives essential to tackling the complicated challenges of urban sustainability. In bringing together students and faculty from the fields of business, environmental science, public policy, and urban planning and design, the program aims to produce graduates with the necessary analytical and decision-making skills for careers in the public and private sectors. How successful has Xavier’s program been in preparing students for careers in the field of urban sustainability? What role does a first semester course on the history of green urbanism and urban sustainability play in the program?
Results/Conclusions
Xavier’s program has graduated students who have gone on to work in government, business, and the non-profit world. Much of this is the product of a skills-based curriculum (quantitative methods, GIS, land use regulation, cost-benefit analysis), but students consistently point to an introductory, historically-oriented course on “urban ecologies, urban economies” as central to their success in the program. This course is a multidisciplinary investigation of the intersections, collisions, and potential synergies between urban/regional economies and urban/regional ecologies. Tentative conclusions about what this course brings to the program include: a balance between the bad news about environmental degradation with a hopeful determination to understand the challenges and craft responses to them; the importance of narrative in bringing about environmental degradation and combatting it; a recognition that the sources and solutions to environmental degradation come from both market processes and public policies; a recognition of the contributions and the limitation of ecological thinking in addressing environmental degradation; the impossibility of addressing urban sustainability in an exclusively urban context (emphasis on regionalism and history of agriculture); and the importance of both big and small things, external changes as well as interval changes, in the effort to combat environmental degradation.